ARTH 4484 Spring 2011

Updating blog

Updating May 2009

Deleting MySpace & Other Corporate Site Accounts (Free Your Own Content)

http://bang.calit2.net/tts/

Here are some images from our Main Street Bail Out on Friday Dec 12. Look for us next week on your lunch break.

Main Street Bailout

4484 streetview is back, and we are bailing out Main Street Friday Dec.12 at 8:30 pm. We will be in front of Red Star on the corner of Laurel and Lafayette taking applications for bailout requests. Applications will be reviewed and processed immediately. If your request of a bailout is approved you will receive it instantly in the form of freshly printed cash money! Come early, come late it does matter we will be taking applications all night, and trust me we won’t run out of cash.

Final Exam Essay

Throughout this semester, I have been working with writing C code and programming micro controllers to activate kinetic sculpture. Technology always seems to play a part in my sculpture and with that knowledge I feel the most important parts of this class to me are what I was directly working with. The Hacker Manifesto by Mackinze Wark and really the whole section on hacking and hacktivism really hit home with me. I think the theories behind free information and free access are important ones. With my work I am taking these pieces of computer parts or boards and modifying or hacking them to work in a new way to activate a new conversation of thought. Alexander Galloway talks about computer code being in the same realm as natural languages. (Galloway, “Protocol”, 165)This has started a new wave of thinking for me and I have been working now with linguistics in my work and using text to help convey my concept. Here is an example image of a piece of work that is “hacked” both through its hardware and code writing.

This is the same thing biotech art is doing. By taking an existing process of a lab they modify it and create a new way to look at it and display it which changes the conversation. The social structures which are in place begin to break down with work like TC&A’s ¼ scale ear (http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/). They challenge the way our society thinks about the body and modifications to the body. This type of work both highly technical and socially questionable brings a slew of ideas to the conversation and allows for the audience to discuss and converse on what they see. Without pushing their bias they have created a conversation between people. This is something I have always tried to do in my own work and by researching them and STELARC (www.stelarc.va.com.au) I have learned much about their work and would like to know more about the process which I why I have and will continue to research them. I feel like this course has been a great stepping stone for me and allowed me to research people I would have never been introduced to.

Final Exam Essay

Blair Mulvihill – Undergraduate – Graphic Design

Graphic design is, on its most fundamental level, a form of communication. It is about solving problems; coming up with creative solutions in order to get a message across. The entire course was important to my career, each part in its own way. By leaning about these new forms of art I have ultimately gained knowledge of new ways to achieve my goals as a communicator. By listening to presentations I gain a better understanding of the artwork, and by giving presentations to the class it helps me learn how to communicate more clearly to future clients.
Graphic design is very much entwined in the digital world. It is interesting and important to see how others have used digital media to create art. The creation of networks, such as Facebook chat, and databases are perfect examples of powerful uses of the digital media.
One possible way I may be able to incorporate this art form into my own work is by creating more interactive elements, such as the Spectropia movie by Toni Dove. Allowing the audience to participate in my media artwork as well as my print work in unique ways allows for a more memorable experience, bringing about more success for my clients, and in turn me.
In Life Support by Revital Cohen, greyhounds are taken from a potentially bad situation and given a second chance in life. I hope to take some of my artwork and create a positive impact on the world such as this concept.

-Hope I did this right

Final Essay

Thousands of people walk through museums all over the world each day and have no clue what is going on in the art world at the present time. I consider myself to be part of the “art world” and yet I had never heard of many of the theorists or artists discussed in this class. How had I missed looking at this artwork? Would I have considered this artwork?
As a painter, I was influenced most by the second half of the semester, but now realize how important the first half of the semester was. Looking back, the “cyborg nation” that Donna Haraway wrote about does not seem far fetched. Society is taking on characteristics of computer categoricalization. It is the artist’s duty to fight “optoelectronic “, or a type of plugged in to operate world. This would benefit government and corporate control. On the other hand it is beneficial to society for technology boundaries to be pushed. The Tissue Culture and Art Project are pushing the boundaries as artist. While looking at the grown cells, I thought about Neuromancer. When written in 1984, technology such as cell culture growth seemed years away. Through the Tissue Culture and Art Project website the average person can see where art can take technology. I feel it is important for art and science to merge, possibly because of my own associations with medical technology.
This class influenced me more than I could have imagined. Most importantly, I have learned how important it is to research new artworks. If someone would have asked me three months ago if locative media was artwork, my reply would have been no. Now, my views have been altered. I look deeper into what is art and what artworks are trying to convey. This class may not change my paintings as a whole, but it has sparked new interest for other types of art. After graduating in May, I may venture back to my original major, Nuclear Medicine, now that I have a new found respect on how I as an artist can work with science. As a student who has always gone back and forth between art and science, I believe the second half of the semester showed me ways that I can create an equality for both fields in my own life.

Galloway, Alexander R. . “Protocal Futures.” Protocal: How Control Exists After Decentralization. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2004. Pp. 147-246.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer: Remembering Tomorrow. New York: Ace Books, 1984.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, The Reinvention of Nature. New York : Routledge, 1991. Pp. 149-181
The Tissue Culture and Art Project. Mar. 2008. 19 Nov. 2008 http://www.tcauwaedu.au/
Virilio, Paul. “The Third Interval”. Open Sky. Julie Rose, trans. London:Verso, 1997. Pp. 9-21.

Final Exam

The readings that really hit home for me were the ones that I presented to the class. When I was signing up for them I knew they would be the most pertinent to my artwork and lifestyle. Donna Harraway’s reading (A Cyborg Manifesto, 1991) tied in with subRosa was the most meaningful to me and I continue to look up readings and websites that are in that same vein. Harraway and subRosa (separately) speak for women globally, which goes against the history of women’s rights in the west (which practices white humanism through searching for a single ground of domination to secure their revolutionary voice). For them both to understand that it all begins and ends with eugenics when referring to gender and biotechnology, the labor market, social structures, etc is not something that I’ve read very much until recently in the past year. For example subRosa in Yes Species, which is a series of writings, precludes the history of biotechnology with a history lesson in eugenics in the US, WWII to date, because they believe in order to truly understand the “why’s” and “what’s” behind biotechnology (especially biotechnology that’s implemented in reproductive technologies) you have to examine the history of eugenics. Harraway’s writing to restructure social-feminism to include women globally and fighting for women at the bottom of the labor market (3rd world countries), recognizing that the history of the women’s movement is filled with latent eugenic content, meant a lot to me.

subRosa’s work like U-Gen-A-Chix questions the biotechnology community’s standard of ethics. Artists/activists should question their own ethics in bioart and the implications of their experiments on animals and the environment. It’s a double standard I think when it comes to bioethics in the art community…We’re allowed to make a bunny luminescent and grow ‘semi-living’ matter, but we throw a fit and do a performance about how our food is being cultured. But performers like subRosa bring subjects to light in bioethics without stirring any questions about their own ethical/unethical practices in biotechnology, because they do a lot of parodies and online pieces that only ‘seem real.’ I appreciate their efforts to raise important questions without being unethical in their tactics.

The content of my work as a studio artist has everything to do with perceptions of people that are different, and the history of those perceptions in the US when talking about people of color…or The Other, as they are historically referred to. My work deals with how the implications of eugenics effects our perceptions of people daily without us being conscious of it…stereotyping, appropriating, classifying, ignoring, etc.  The Harraway reading and research I did on subRosa has helped me to further my language when talking about my work and also gives me a new frame of reference when I’m building a concept for a project/art piece. For example, the ethics or lack thereof in the biotechnology community and their effects on women globally is a subject area that I am interested in making work around.

final exam question

David Carpenter

In this course I have been treated and taught as a grad student in studio arts (which I am) and not like an art history grad student. This is something that I am grateful for and has made this course more beneficial to my studio practice and me. From the course I have gained a significant amount of exposure both to new artist and important theorists and ideas. This exposure has helped me find the context that I want my work to be placed.
My work is inspired by the difference between my grandfather’s world and my own. I use this juxtaposition to address gender roles, the value of labor and the laborer, and to examine systems of hierarchy. Exposure to Michel Foucault , Gillies Deleuze, [1] and Paul Virilo[2] has been a direct influence in the development of my current work. Foucault and Deleuze [1] are influential to me for their examination of social systems of hierarchy. Virilo’s[2] ability to walk forward and look backwards at the same time gives him a unique perspective to the future of our techno driven world.
My favorite thing about this course is the exposure to new artists. Many I would never have know about otherwise. The London base group Revital Cohen made a piece called “Life Support” where they substituting a dialysis machine with a sheep. Like many of the artist we have studied this semester they use new technology to conduct a conversation about the how our world is changing. What makes this work and many others we looked at so powerful is not the use of technology, but that their ideas are so well crafted. The result is that the viewer is immediately asking questions. Questions like, “Is the real? Does it work? What would it be like to live with farm animals? Is this a normal pet relationship?” In some ways I think it may be easier to grow a transgenic sheep than to develop an idea that engages the viewer so well.
With the exposure that 4484 Streetview has given me, I now know the context in which I want my work to exist. That context is socially charged work that is not motivated or limited by sales and or gallery space. I want to make work that addresses complicated issues in a way that the viewer must as well; work that is inspired by developments in new technology and is not limited by old traditions of making.

[1]

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on Societies of Control.” The Cybercities Reader . Ed. Stephen Graham. Routledge, 2004. 73-77.

[2]

Virilio, Paul. “The Perspective of Real Time” Pp.22-34 and “Grey Ecology”Pp.58-68 Open Sky . Verso, 1997.

[3]

Revital Cohen, “Life Support” 2008,

http://www.revitalcohen.com/?p=15#show_slide